29 minute read
COVID cases continue to rise
l COVID-19 cases y f continue to rise
y Haywood moves back g into ‘orange zone’
STAFF REPORTS
After months of decline, North Carolina is experiencing a rapid increase in COVID-19 spread among those who are unvaccinated.
On July 22, 1,998 cases were reported to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and 817 people are hosy l pitalized with 132 admitted in the past 24 hours. There have been 9,053 cases reported over the past seven days compared to 5,441 l cases in the preceding seven days — a 66% increase — and hospitalizations doubled since July 9 and are at the highest rate they have been since the May 11.
“Unvaccinated North Carolinians are unnecessarily getting sick, being hospitalized and dying,” said NCDHHS Secretary
Mandy K. Cohen. “Don’t wait to vaccinate.
And if you haven’t gotten your shot, you need to wear a mask indoors at all times when you are in public spaces.”
The state’s other key metrics are also increasing, including the number of people going to the emergency department with
COVID-like symptoms and the percent of tests that are positive — which has been over 6% for the past week.
In addition, this week’s updated County
Alert System has one red county with critical viral spread and 12 orange counties with substantial spread, up from one two weeks ago. Richmond County is red, and Cherokee,
Chowan, Cleveland, Cumberland, Graham,
Hoke, Lee, Onslow, Pitt, Rutherford and
Sampson Counties are orange.
On July 22, Haywood County issued a press release stating that Haywood had moved into the orange zone, indicating significant community spread, well above the levels seen over the past two months.
“As cases in our community rise, we want to encourage you to practice preventative measures that have proven to be effective.
Wash your hands often, try to maintain a safe distance when in group settings, and wear your mask when you cannot be socially distant,” said Haywood County Public Health Director Sarah Henderson. “If you haven’t been vaccinated or have been on the fence, now is the time. Vaccination protects you and those around you by decreasing transmission and serious illness.”
In the last week, Haywood County Public Health has received notice of 62 new cases of COVID-19. As of 5 p.m. on July 26, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has recorded a total of 4,619 cases in Haywood County since the pandemic began.
People who test positive for COVID-19 are encouraged to reach out to friends or family that meet the close contact criteria and encourage them to self-quarantine and get tested five to six days after their exposure to the individual who tested positive.
The health department advised that businesses should be mindful that having quarantined employees return to work too quickly could cause a cluster of cases in the workplace. Employees who have been exposed should quarantine for the recommended time frame of 14 days from the date of exposure to help reduce potential spread.
More than 94% of recent North Carolina cases are in people who were not fully vaccinated. People who are unvaccinated are at risk for infection by the more contagious and potentially more dangerous Delta variant. Patients who have recently tested positive for COVID-19 and are at higher risk for severe illness should talk to their health care provider to see if monoclonal antibody therapy is an option for them.
To date, 60% of North Carolina adults have received at least one dose and 57% are fully vaccinated. To find a vaccine in your area, use the Find a Vaccine Location tool at myspot.nc.gov or call 888.675.4567. You can also text your zip code to 438829 to find vaccine locations near you.
Vaccination clinic hours are available Monday through Friday during normal business hours at the Haywood County Health Department. Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson vaccines available now, no appointment is necessary.
Civilian police academy seeks applicants
If you’ve ever wanted to know more about how your local police department functions, then the free Waynesville Police Department’s Civilian Police Academy is for you. Classes are held for eight straight Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. at the Waynesville Police Department beginning August 19, and include lectures from patrol officers, detectives, a K-9 handler and Chief David Adams. Participants can also schedule a ride-along with an officer. The program is open to Haywood County residents (including part-time residents) age 18 and older. This year, those aged 16 and 17 can also take part if accompanied by a parent or guardian. Since 2011, the WPD CPA has graduated more than 100 people, some of whom go on to become CPA volunteers and help out with Main Street events, festivals and other volunteer opportunities. Applications are available at the WPD office, 9 South Main Street. Questions? Contact Mary Ford, civvol@waynesvillenc.gov.
HaywoodBuilders.com 100 Charles St. WAYNESVILLE
Ingles Nutrition Notes
written by Ingles Dietitian Leah McGrath
Join us for a "Taste of Local"
Where: Ingles in Arden - 352 Airport Rd. Thursday, Aug 5th • 3-6pm Who: meet some of our local farmers and food entrepreneurs...
• Annie's Breads • Asheville Pretzel • Biltmore Wines • Biscuit Head • City Bakery • Destination Sauces • Dynamite Roasting • Firewalker Hot Sauce • Highland Brewing • Mimi's Mountain Mixes • New Belgium Brewery • Pete's Granola • Pisgah Roasters • PotPie • Salsa Brava • Sunburst Trout • Sunshine Sammies • Sweeten Creek Brewery • Unicoi Preserves • Vinnie's Sauces • Woogie's Mustards & MORE! Leah McGrath, RDN, LDN Ingles Market Corporate Dietitian @InglesDietitian Leah McGrath - Dietitian 800.334.4936
No smoke without buyers
Research explores cigar wrapper tobacco as cash crop for mountain farmers
BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER
On a perfectly sunny and gloriously cool July morning, Tucker Worley starts up the John Deere golf cart and takes off down the gravel road.
Air infused with the fresh scents of wildflowers, cut grass and morning dew — and, admittedly, of cow manure — whips past as Worley drives past plots of crops and a barn full of cattle before laying on the brakes where the tobacco grows — 2 acres of green, broad-leaved plants laid out in a grid pattern on the red dirt.
Green mountains rise up from the horizon. Surrounded by the 400 acres of agricultural experiments at the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Resources Mountain Research Station office, it’s impossible to tell that Waynesville’s town limits begin just to the east.
The crop before him is both familiar and foreign to Worley’s heritage. While it’s all tobacco, just half of it is the familiar Burley variety, and those Burley plants exist only to fund the research underway on the remaining acre.
That acre is also planted with tobacco, but with varieties optimized for the outsides of cigars, not the insides of cigarettes. It’s part of a research project led by Matthew Vann, an N.C. State University crop and soil sciences assistant professor who hopes to see the farms that once made their money growing Burley someday make a profit growing cigar wrappers.
“We have yet to find a really good replacement for Burley in our traditional Burley area of the state,” said Matthew Vann. “The question was posed: Could we possibly grow cigar wrapper tobacco in those areas?”
The question came from Chad Moody, agriculture research manager at the research station. Moody told Vann he thought cigar wrapper tobacco could be a good fit for smaller farmers that once grew Burley. Vann ran with the idea, and he’s running fast — because the institutional knowledge carried by Western North Carolina’s aging corps of former tobacco farmers will be a key asset in the effort.
“We look around and we see opportunity where some of these growers that traditionally grew tobacco, they still have the infrastructure,” he said. “They still have tobacco production knowledge.”
July 28-August 3, 2021 Research specialist Tucker Worley cares for an acre of cigar wrapper tobacco plants at the Mountain Research Station in
Waynesville. Holly Kays photo
A tobacco plant blooms in the test plot field.
Holly Kays photo
THE END OF BURLEY
Worley was just 8 or 9 years old when his family farm quit growing tobacco.
“They had close to 40 acres the last couple years of Burley tobacco, which is quite a bit for Burley tobacco production,” he recalled. “We had greenhouses where we started plants, and we sold transplants, and that’s probably what I remember the most is playing in the greenhouses as a kid, helping carry trays and stuff like that.”
But as the 21st century approached, the world changed for tobacco farmers. Demand had been declining for years as awareness spread about the negative effects of cigarette use, and in 1998 the landmark Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement marked a sea change, with four major tobacco companies agreeing to pay $206 billion over 25 years as well as perpetual payments to states, compensation for the Medicaid costs those states had incurred in treating tobacco-related illnesses.
Then, in 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act, which did away with the Depression-era quota system that had long kept prices high for farmers. Prices crashed, and many small farmers — like the Worleys — got out of the tobacco business (see HAYWOOD, pg 7). These days, the 300 acres in Leicester first farmed by Worley’s greatgrandfather produces corn silage, cattle, honeybees and a few vegetable crops.
Now 24, Worley farms the land with his grandfather and his parents. They make enough money to keep the property tax paid off, but not enough to make a living. Worley has a day job. After becoming the first in his family to graduate college, he started work as a horticulture research specialist at the research station.
He hopes that his work on the research farm in Waynesville will mean that one day,
SEE TOBACCO, PAGE 8
Tobacco’s Haywood County heyday
BY CORY VAILLANCOURT POLITICS EDITOR
Slowly meandering through Haywood County’s tranquil farmlands, the winding two-lane mountain road rises and falls as behind each bend it reveals rustic panoramas dotted with far-off homesteads.
A torrential summer thunderstorm paused here before moving on, leaving behind pockets of mist playing below distant peaks, the sweet steamy smell of wet grass in the fields so strong it almost becomes a taste. Foals lazily graze, backdropped by disused barns engaged in sort of a slow-motion collapse.
This is the heart of tobacco country. Or at least, it was.
The cultivation of tobacco — here, pronounced ‘backer — was central to the existence of this rural section for generations, until market subsidies went the way of ashtrays on airplanes.
Each day, the legacy of Haywood County’s tobacco industry fades further and further, like wisps of smoke ascending, dissipating, in the thick July air.
Those who remember it, like Ben and Clarine Best, remember it well, and by now have lived long enough to see subsequent generations start to make memories of their own.
Ben Best was born into the Great Depression and has lived most of his life with his wife, Clarine, up that winding mountain road in Crabtree.
“Well, Ben’s 92 and we had grown ‘backer all of our lives because out here in the country, you know, there were no factories or anything around,” Clarine said. “A ‘backer crop was the only income people here could depend on. Beans didn’t bring as much as ‘backer did. And we didn’t know back then that there was any harm in smoking. Everybody smoked, chewed or dipped snuff.”
A few years after Ben was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn into office just as the United States entered the depths of the Depression. Prices for basic agricultural commodities like cotton, tobacco and wheat had dropped dramatically, so farmers compensated by producing more to make up for the loss in revenue. That led to huge surpluses, further drops in price and utter impoverishment for millions of Americans, especially farmers.
Ben’s father, born in 1899, also grew tobacco — the flue cured variety, used mainly for cigar wrappers.
“You could build a barn and close the barn up, hang your ‘backer in there, then build you a fire and that heated it,” said Ben. “That’s what they called flue cured. Him and some of the other fellers said you’d grow a whole crop a’ ‘backer and have to take it to Tennessee to sell it.”
Often, the sale price wouldn’t cover the cost of producing and transporting the crop.
“That’s why flue cured never caught on here in the mountains,” Clarine said. “But then that Burley that we’d grow, that grew well here.”
Air cured Burley tobacco is primarily used in cigarettes and benefitted tremendously when Congress, in May of 1933, passed Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, which had the goal of restoring the purchasing power of the American farmer to prewar (1909-1914) levels.
The Act, and subsequent amendments to it, accomplished that in the case of tobacco production through a combination of price supports and production quotas.
When the Act was signed, tobacco went for 13 cents a pound, on average. A decade later, it had increased by 250 percent to 40 cents, and continued to climb. That made Burley more worthwhile for Western North Carolina farmers like the Bests to grow, but it was a grueling, dirty, year-round ordeal.
“You’d start preparing the seed bed in December,” said Ben. “A lot of people would burn them.”
Burning would help keep weeds down as the tobacco, which would be planted in February, would grow. Canvas was placed over the rows to ward off killing freezes, and then removed about the last of April or first of May.
All summer long, it was a seemingly endless cycle of weeding and trimming; in midseason, the top bloom was cut off, to force more of the plant’s energy into the leaves. Small shoots, called suckers, would quickly emerge and have to be pruned for the same reason.
“It was the stickiest job you could go through,” said Clarine. “You’d have ‘backer gum all over you.”
Then, there were the pests. Black shank. Blue mold. Aphids.
“When the ‘backer got about this high,” Ben said, raising his arm to his chest, “you’d get these hornworms.”
A tobacco hornworm ends its life as a Carolina sphinx moth, but it begins as a larva that feeds on the leaves of plants in the Solanaceae (nightshade) family, like tobacco. The larvae grow into plump, vivid green worms, with white diagonal slashes and black dots on their backs. They can reach 3 inches in length.
“If you saw holes in the leaf, you’d look until you found all of ‘em, and then put ‘em on the ground and stomp on ‘em,” said Clarine. “It was a mess. It was so terribly labor intensive.”
Starting in late August, the cutting and spiking would begin. First, using a long-handled knife shaped like a tomahawk, the stalks would be cut near the bottom, and then speared with a metal-tipped wooden stick. Five or six stalks would fit on each spike.
Sometimes the spikes would be left in the field to let the leaves wilt, but eventually they ended up hanging in a barn for up to two months, or more.
“When your tobacco had hung in the barn until it had cured, then you found a foggy morning or a rainy day, so it would be pliable and not break when you touched it,” Clarine said. “That’s when we’d grade it.”
As the plants grew, they would produce leaves from bottom to top, all with different properties and qualities.
“Down the stalk of ‘backer there, you had five different grades,” said Ben. “You had lugs on the bottom, which was ragged. Then the next up was smokers, which they used for cigarettes. That section of the stalk would have a good leaf on it for cigar wrappin’, but not all tobacco would have it. ‘Wrappers,’ they called it. And then you had a bright red, and then a dark red, and they got darker as you went up.”
With the leaves all separated out, they’d then be put on the back of a truck bound for Asheville, some 30 miles distant. It was a mad rush.
Farmers from across the region all crowded into the market at the same time, eager to present their wares to buyers from Big Tobacco, who would browse the offerings and buy what they wanted, sometimes for cash on the spot.
“When you went to the market, they had the baskets packed in long rows, as far as you can see,” Clarine said. “My daddy took
— Clarine Best
CIGAR DEMAND ON THE RISE
Unlike cigarettes, cigars are seeing rising demand, said David Savona, who since 2015 has been the executive editor of Cigar Afficionado magazine. More people began smoking during the pandemic, and firstquarter imports for 2021 up were up 47%, putting the year off to a “pretty fast start.”
While the domestic cigar manufacturing industry is extremely limited, he said, the domestic market for cigar tobacco is significantly larger, mostly clustered in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. He thinks there could be room for North Carolina growers to enter it.
Top-grade cigar wrappers fetch triple the price per pound that Burley tobacco does, making the crop an eye-catching possibility for farmers who have for years been struggling with stagnant crop prices amid ever-heightening input prices. But it’s not the first time a crop’s been touted as “the next Burley.” A few years ago, everyone was talking about hops. Then it was hemp. Neither prophecy has proven true.
But Vann believes this crop will be different. For one thing, it’s tobacco. The process might be different for this particular product, but it’s still tobacco, and mountain farmers know how to grow it.
For another, the value and demand for a particular tobacco crop is tied up in its taste and flavor, which is largely determined by the unique geology and climate of the place where it’s grown.
“You’ve really got to look at certain areas for this tobacco to be produced,” he said. “I would probably say that hemp grown for CBD oil in Eastern North Carolina or Western North Carolina is probably the same as hemp grown for CBD oil in the state of Illinois. That would be my agronomic guess. But you take tobacco to these different regions, and it will all have a different taste profile.”
WNC’s history with Burley tobacco means that it’s already proven itself a region where good-tasting tobacco grows well.
“We’ve got a real chance to do something great for the North Carolina agricultural community,” Vann said.
To be used as cigar wrappers, tobacco leaves must be thin and large, without
imperfections. Holly Kays photo “We look around and we see opportunity where some of these growers that traditionally grew tobacco, they still have the infrastructure. They still have tobacco production knowledge.”
— Chad Moody, agriculture research manager at the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Resources Mountain Research Station
PERFECTION REQUIRED
Like Worley, Vann comes from a tobacco farming family. And at 34, he is very much on the younger side of a profession whose average age in the U.S. as of 2017 was 57.5. The reasons behind the ever-increasing average age of American farmer are many and complex — but the profession’s high financial risk and limited financial reward is certainly a significant part of the equation.
“Nothing has walked through our front door that put on the table what tobacco did for a lot of small farmers in the Southern U.S.,” Vann said.
Because of their high per-pound price, cigar wrappers have the potential to change that, but it’s not a certainty — they’re a difficult, labor-intensive crop to grow.
To grace the exterior of a cigar, the leaf has to be perfect. No holes, no tears, no insect damage. Cigar wrapper leaves are thin, rather than thick and leathery like Burley leaves. And they can’t be small either — cigar wrappers must be at least 9 inches wide.
“It’s not, strip the leaves off after curing and put it in a hydraulic press and make a big bale of tobacco,” Vann said. “You almost are packing the leaf up almost like a Christmas present.”
On top of that, growers need an aggressive pesticide application program to ensure that insects and disease don’t take out the crop. Most cigar wrapper varieties are open-
pollinated and have little natural disease resistance, said Worley.
“It’s a pretty intense input system,” said Vann.
Cigar wrappers are planted at a slightly lower density per acre, and they’re not allowed to stalk as high, so as to encourage the plants to put more energy into making each leaf large and lovely. They also have a shorter growing season, with harvest coming 70 days after planting instead of the 90 or 100 needed for Burley.
In addition, there’s an inherent difficulty in predicting the market. Tobacco that’s picked today isn’t smoked until years later, because fine cigars require aged tobacco.
“It’s very, very difficult for companies to adjust to sharp swings and market conditions,” Savona said.
All that taken together leads Vann to believe that, even once his research is complete and farmers have easy access to best practices for cultivation, cigar wrappers will be a small-acreage crop.
“We don’t anticipate we’ll have growers planting two and 300 acres of this stuff,” he said. “It will probably be in the single-digit acres, especially early on. The inputs are so high right now, particularly on the labor side. We think this goes really well with a lot of the small farms we have in Western North Carolina.”
A few farmers are already trying it out. Vann estimates that 25-30 farms — mostly in the eastern portion of the mountain region
and in the piedmont area along the Virginia border — are growing small plots of wrapper tobacco.
THE END GAME
The question is whether the cost of inputs — the labor, the pesticides — balances out to make cigar wrappers a crop worth growing. That’s what Vann’s trying to determine.
He’s been researching the crop since 2019, when the first plots went in at the test farms in Waynesville and Laurel Springs. It was a “real learning curve,” said Vann, a sentiment with which Worley agrees.
“The quality was kind of low across the board, but then we were able to learn from that and expand on each, and last year we actually had close to 30% of the wrapper grade, which is the highest grade you can get,” Worley said.
The test farm sells its produce as a means of helping to fund the research that happens there. The remaining 70% of the crop still sold, but at a lower price under a lower grade. Still, altogether the crop averaged about $4 per pound, which is double what you’d get for burley tobacco.
Now, the test farm is continuing to experiment, trying out different varieties, fertilization rates and handling methods. The goal is to learn those lessons on the research farm so farmers new to the crop don’t have to figure everything out on their own dime.
“We’re kind of coming into this thing with a very broad vision of trying to find things that we can plug into our system, that our growers can do and do successfully on the farm,” Vann said. Out on the farm in Waynesville, Worley spends his days monitoring rows of cigar wrapper tobacco planted in blocks of plants 30 feet long and four rows wide. Each block represents a different fertilizer regimen. The goal is to find out how many pounds per acre of nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen the farmer must apply to get wrappergrade plants without damaging the plants and surrounding environment — not to mention the bottom line — with unnecessary chemicals. “Our end game is to develop agronomic recommendations like fertilizer recommendations that are financially sustainable and also environmentally sustainable,” said Vann. “We want pesticide application programs that are safe for consumers and safe for the environment.” That end game is spurred along by a $60,000 grant that Vann’s research team landed from the NCDACS’s New and Emerging Crops Program. In addition to continuing the research in Waynesville and Laurel Springs, this year Vann launched test plots in Oxford and Clayton, both located in the Raleigh area. He expects to continue the research for another two to three years.
It’s exciting from a scientific standpoint, but for the researchers, it’s more than just academic — it’s personal.
“It would mean a whole lot to bring something back in the mountains that could sustain the local family farms again, and make them profitable,” said Worley. “There’s a lot of housing developments going in because when people aren’t willing to farm and it’s sometimes not profitable to farm, that deters a lot of young people, I think, not go in farming and not to keep the land.”
With the right crop, he hopes, that might change.
HAYWOOD, CONTINUED FROM 7 me and my brother when we were small to the market one time. People would take their children and set them up on a basket of ‘backer hoping that the buyer would see that the man had children.”
The lugs, at the bottom, went for the lowest price. The smokers, the next level up, garnered the highest price — except for wrappers. Above that, the leaves declined in price, but thanks to the price supports in the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the entire endeavor became somewhat lucrative.
Price supports, however, weren’t solely responsible for the economic sustainability of tobacco production. The Act also introduced restrictions on supply.
“When they first started, you could grow all you wanted at one time,” Ben said. “But after a while, you got an allotment.”
Here, allotments were doled out in 1-acre increments which could be traded or sold to others to form larger tracts.
“And that’s all you could grow,” he said. “When they set that acre, they had to stop.”
That doesn’t mean some people didn’t try tucking a few more rows up in one of the area’s many hidden hollers, where moonshine stills (and later, marijuana) could sometimes be found.
For a time as a teenager, Ben’s job was to police the allotments to ensure nobody was growing more than they were supposed to grow. Through it all, he said no one ever attempted to bribe him or threaten him into looking the other way.
“You’d have to go to every farm and measure how much acreage he had. And a lot of them would overseed it, they’d get maybe another tenth of an acre. I’d draw a map with measurements on it and I’d go turn it in and they would come out and make the man cut it down,” he said. “I’d say, ‘Now I can turn it in like this, or I’ll just sit here and watch you pull your plants up.’”
According to a 1959 N.C. Department of Agriculture publication, Haywood County ranked third in the state — behind Madison and Buncombe counties, respectively — in Burley tobacco acreage under cultivation, with more than 1,100.
That supply was largely powered by domestic demand for cigarettes that peaked in the mid-1960s at more than 4,100 cigarettes a year for every man, woman and child in the country.
Since then, it’s dropped in each decade, largely due to the increased availability of reliable health information about the dangers of smoking as well as prohibitions on smoking in places where it used to be acceptable — classrooms, elevators, hospitals, restaurants, even television.
Ben and Clarine agreed that even with the help of their boys, growing tobacco was a lot of work and one acre of tobacco was about all one family could handle, anyway — a testament to the small-scale nature of tobacco farming in Western North Carolina.
“When we built our house here in 1957, we had $3,000 saved and in order to complete the house, we had to borrow $10,000, which scared us to death because it looked like a million in this day in time,” said Clarine. “And back then, people just did not go in debt. So he got a job at Champion [paper mill, in nearby Canton] and we grew tobacco on his days off and in the evenings.”
Ben started off at $1.25 an hour at the mill, and Clarine remembers his weekly paychecks in the $40 to $60 range, which works out to a yearly take-home of about $3,000. Around that time, Ben’s dad took their crop to market because Ben was working the afternoon shift at the mill. Ben’s dad returned home with a check for $1,800. Clarine signed it, and took it right down to Clyde Savings and Loan to put on their mortgage.
“Ben came home that night,” Clarine remembers, “and he said, ‘Well, where’s the check?’ and I said, ‘Well here’s the stub, I’ve already taken and turned it in at the savings and loan.’ He said, ‘I declare, a man works as hard as I have all year and he don’t even get to see his check!’”
The bank wasn’t as enthusiastic about the rapid progress the Bests were making on their loan, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it.
“We paid the loan off with our tobacco in five years, and we’ve never owed any more money ever since,” she said.
For decades, life pretty much went on in the same seasonal way up that winding road, until the federal policies that gave stability to the tobacco industry and millions of rural farmers like Ben and Clarine Best went up in smoke.
Once the landmark Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was reached in November 1998, it became apparent that America’s relationship with tobacco — dating to colonial times — was about to change.
That year, four major tobacco companies reached a settlement with 46 attorneys general suing for Medicaid costs incurred treating tobacco-related illnesses. The result was $206 billion over 25 years and perpetual payments to states that spawned organizations like North Carolina’s Golden Leaf Foundation.
Health advocacy groups then set to work changing the political landscape of the product, just as cigarette manufacturers looked to cheaper offshore tobaccos sourced in far-off places like Malawi and Brazil.
The price supports remained in place through the first few years of the 21st century until President George W. Bush signed the Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act of 2004, which also abolished the quota system.
Prices immediately crashed, from $1.99 a pound to $1.64 in 2005. Many small-scale family farmers like the Bests got out of tobacco production at that point, and as domestic cigarette consumption simultaneously plummeted, they stayed out.
“Without those supports, you might grow a whole crop of ‘backer, take it to market, and not get anything for it,” Ben said, echoing his father’s experience in Tennessee a century earlier.
As outlined in a 2005 Congressional Research Service report, more than 12.6 billion pounds of tobacco were produced globally in 2004 — the last year U.S. crops had price support — with China alone accounting for about 4.4 billion pounds.
Brazil and India both produced well over a billion pounds, with the United States weighing in at 788 million pounds, 94 percent of which was for cigarettes.
In total, approximately 57,000 U.S. farms utilized 408,000 acres for tobacco production — an area almost 20 percent larger than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The estimated value of the 2004 domestic crop was $1.7 billion — about $4,100 an acre, or $1.99 a pound.
Kentucky and North Carolina produced a full two-thirds of all domestic tobaccos, with Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia accounting for another 25 percent. In North Carolina, tobacco accounted for a staggering 7.9 percent of all farm commodities.
Today, per capita cigarette consumption is less than 1,100 and only 13.7 percent of Americans over the age of 18 are currently smokers, down from a high of 43 percent in 1965. Last year, U.S. domestic tobacco production was less than half of what it was in 2004.
While some tobacco farmers let their land go to cattle grazing, others sought substitute crops like sorghum, sugar cane or tomatoes to fill the void. Some are even producing hemp for the state’s burgeoning CBD market.
A recent boom in cigar consumption, however, is forcing farmers to rethink that; a new research project at the Mountain Research Station in Waynesville is even exploring the possibility of again growing tobacco suitable for wrappers (see TOBACCO, p.6).
The days of the small-scale Western North Carolina family ‘backer farmer may be over, at least for now, but they’re by no means forgotten.
Haywood County businessman Travis Bramlett, who’s married to Ben and Clarine’s granddaughter, Maggie, is keeping the legacy alive inside his Valley Cigar and Wine Co., located on Soco Road.
Bramlett’s lined the walls with large, colorful reproductions of old photographs from the Bests’ farm, and their children working on it. Spindles on the wooden stairway leading to the upstairs wine bar and BurtReynolds-themed bathroom are made from those same spikes used by Ben and Clarine to clear the fields.
The store offers a walk-in humidor and wide variety of fine cigars as well as a selection of beer and wines, all of which can be enjoyed out on the front porch, not far from that winding two-lane mountain road that leads not only to Ben and Clarine Best’s farm, but also back to a different era — tobacco’s Haywood County heyday.
“They’re the last of the family that’s still left that was doing that kind of farming. Those tobacco barns are falling down,” Bramlett said. “It kind of ended with them, and no one else is doing it now. They were the greatest generation, and I don’t want anyone to forget them.”
Photos from the Bests’ farm (left) hang in the Valley Cigar & Wine Co. Owned by Travis Bramlett, the Valley Cigar & Wine Co. is keeping
tobacco’s Haywood County heyday alive. Cory Vaillancourt photos
